Those with a holistic approach to care believe that we must consider the whole being rather than just single areas in order to provide healing or treatment. In order to help a patient with pain in one area of the body, we must observe and understand everything else that’s going on. Holistic care goes beyond treating ailments when they arise and furthers care to provide preventative measures for the mind, body, and spirit to improve the patient’s overall health.
Holism has become a popular branch of nursing in the states and encourages nurses to treat each patient differently and to ‘heal the whole person’. The patient’s physical, mental, spiritual, and environmental strengths and weaknesses are taken into consideration when administering care as their values, beliefs, and previous health experiences.
This holistic approach is now taught through several nursing degrees. You can click here to find out more about studying to become a family nurse practitioner with a focus on holistic healthcare.
In this guide, we’re going to dive deeper into the holistic approach: Where it came from and how it works.
Florence Nightingale Pioneered Holism
As mentioned above, holism focuses on the mind, body, spirit, emotion, and environment. The approach is centered around caring for others, building relationships, and creating interconnectedness.
Florence Nightingale, a pioneer in modern nursing, emphasized the holistic approach in her work: She encouraged unity, wellness, and connection between the patient and nurse and their environment.
While Nightingale brought the idea to life, it wasn’t until 2006 that the American Nurses Association officially recognized holistic nursing. Now, holistic healthcare can be studied as a specialism, with some modules being incorporated into other nursing degrees.
Unlike traditional nursing, holistic care can be provided and practiced in just about any setting and can be used to treat a multitude of diseases, patient groups, and demographics. While treating urgent injuries or ailments, holistic nurses also use complementary (“doing therapies”) and alternative therapies (“being therapies”) to remove potential healing barriers and prevent issues in the future.
‘Doing therapies’ tend to involve medications, adjusting dietary habits, and pain-relieving therapies such as acupuncture. Alongside these modern treatments, nurses will offer or refer patients to services that provide ‘being therapies’ such as meditation and quiet contemplation.
Healing the Whole Person
The fundamentals of traditional healthcare focus on relieving pain, preventing disease, and improving health. People tend to only seek health advice when physical and spiritual symptoms or issues present themselves – with the intention of simply finding a fix to that single problem.
By changing the definition of ‘healthy’ to incorporate the mind, body, and spirit as a collective, more healthcare providers – and their patients – can become more open to a holistic approach to treatment. Rather than just focusing on the current symptoms or crisis, the whole person and their surroundings are considered to understand more about the effects the problem could have on the body, mind, spirit, and the patient’s personal relationships.
Holistic healthcare providers can work closely with patients to create a care plan, completely individual to that person, in line with their values and beliefs.
The barrier to holistic care is time and resources. With a constant shortage of nurses, the staff is under pressure to complete their daily tasks and manage their patient load with strict time constraints. As such, treating the physical being has become the norm as it is much faster when having to treat tens of patients all at once.
However, studies into traditional nursing have shown this approach merely benefits routine and are one-dimensional, often neglecting (or not identifying) the patient’s social and psychological needs.
Treating specific ailments with routine-based care can significantly impact longer-term time and resources for the organization. Recovery often takes longer, with additional risks to the patient’s life arising as a consequence. To overcome this, the nursing workforce needs to be encouraged to take a whole-health attitude to treatment.
Valizadeh et al. (2015) studied a variety of nurses who were using both whole-health and traditional care approaches. The study found that those that went beyond their routine responsibilities to really content and develop relationships with patients were more likely to treat and address the person’s entire needs. Nurses are often influenced by religious, moral, and professional principles that either encourage or stop them from attempting holistic care. However, those that took on board the technique were able to offer much more specialized care plans.
Fostering a Self-Care Culture
Self-care has been a buzzword over the past few years, and the holistic approach fosters the same culture. Not just in patients, but in nursing staff, too. Nurses working with holism are more in touch with their own needs and understand caring for themselves can positively impact the care they provide to others. Burnout is a serious issue for nurses, who are already overworked in the physically, mentally, and emotionally draining industry. And the solution to soothing or preventing burnout is self-care.
Self-care can be anything from taking a hot bath to reconnecting with those original reasons you became a nurse. Encouraging staff to reflect and care for themselves can benefit the organization as a whole and the users of their services.
Connecting with patients on a deeper level to understand more about their emotional and psychological state can dramatically shift the dynamic between service providers and users. Nurses who take time to promote psychological and emotional well-being to their patients often find better patient outcomes and increased satisfaction for both the patient and the nurse.
The Future of Nursing
The focus on holistic care will continue to grow stronger as the way healthcare is dispensed moves forward. The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 brings patients into the conversation about how health care is provided and what the overall outcomes or care should be.
In the current climate, more is being done to focus on a bio-psycho-social-spiritual approach to service coordination and preventive care.
The future of healthcare practice is exciting, as we are constantly growing and learning more about different person-centered approaches. Holistic nursing will continue to be integrated into care systems for all ages and hopefully provide a better, more successful course of treatment for patients across the globe.